Bahá'u'lláh
In the middle of the last century, one of the most notorious dungeons
in the Near East was Tehran's "Black Pit." Once the underground
reservoir for a public bath, its only outlet was a single passage down
three steep flights of stone steps. Prisoners huddled in their own
bodily wastes, languishing in the pit's inky gloom, subterranean cold
and stench-ridden atmosphere.
In
this grim setting, the rarest and most cherished of religious events
was once again played out: mortal man, outwardly human in other
respects, was summoned by God to bring to humanity a new religious
revelation.
The year was 1852, and
the man was a Persian nobleman, known today as Bahá'u'lláh. During His
imprisonment, as He sat with his feet in stocks and a 100-pound iron
chain around his neck, Bahá'u'lláh received a vision of God's will for
humanity.
The event is comparable to
those great moments of the ancient past when God revealed Himself to
His earlier Messengers: when Moses stood before the Burning Bush; when
the Buddha received enlightenment under the Bodhi tree; when the Holy
Spirit, in the form of a dove, descended upon Jesus; or when the
archangel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad.
Bahá'u'lláh's experience in the Black Pit set in motion a process of
religious revelation which, over the next 40 years, led to the
production of thousands of books, tablets and letters that form the core of the sacred scripture of Bahá'í Faith. In those writings, He
outlined a framework for the reconstruction of human society at all
levels: spiritual, moral, economic, political, and philosophical.
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